While I was teaching English to new immigrants, one of my fellow teachers got cancer. He was like a father to his students, and to me. He fought through his treatment in front of his class, his family, and me, not missing a day of work until a month before he died, saying he was like Scheherazade: as long as he kept talking, telling his stories, he couldn’t die. He died anyway. After that, I dreamed of conversations he had with the unborn child I’d had aborted two years earlier. I wrote them down when I woke up, eventually titling them “The Ghost-Child Speaks with the Dying Man.” I never finished writing that piece.
Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts